The Two Faces of Decent Peoples: Right to Dissent, Self-Determination and Liberal Toleration

The Law of Peoples puts forward the controversial claim that liberal toleration extends to certain nonliberal societies that Rawls calls “decent peoples.” Tied to this claim, and no less contentious, is Rawls’s minimalist doctrine of human rights, which leaves out a considerable number of rights enumerated in the widely acknowledged international documents, and importantly among them are the rights to freedom of expression and association and the right to democratic political participation. According to Rawls, even though decent peoples do not honor these rights, liberal peoples ought to tolerate them—this means, not only to refrain from “imposing sanctions on, or forcefully intervening with”, them, but also to respect them “as equal participating members of good standing” within the international order as a moral order. In this thesis, I first review what justification Rawls could provide for his argument that decent societies “deserve respect.” I then argue that to take the reason for this justification seriously, Rawls’s human rights list and his specified “institutional features” have serious loopholes. They make room for, and legitimize, reprehensible state actions that are exactly opposite to the justification he could give for respecting a decent regime. There are thus, as it were, two faces of decent peoples—one respectful and the other reprehensible—conflated in Rawls’s original description of decent peoples. Because we are morally compelled to respect and tolerate one as much as morally compelled to condemn and transform the other, I propose conceptualizing the two in distinct categories as different types of societies and specifying the boundaries between them as clearly as possible. This will not only help fully realize our opposite moral commitments, with greater clarity, in practical action, but also buttress the case of toleration for (the genuine) decent societies in theory. My analysis of these two types of societies further explains why (the genuine) decent societies are rare and somewhat counterintuitive. It also suggests necessary revisions to Rawls’s human rights list and to the limits he specified for forceful intervention. These revised criteria become more defensible on moral grounds and meanwhile still maintain the merit of not being politically parochial. All in all, my analysis sees the value of Rawls’s liberal/decent taxonomy but warns the hazard of losing sight of the reality of authoritarian regimes, and confounding these regimes with decent societies. In this sense, this thesis can be seen as a step towards redeeming the right balance between realism and utopianism in this Rawlsian project in search for a “realistic utopia.